[-empyre-] Re:Is Modernity our Antiquity

[Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl>]

dear empyres,

I saw that Christina introduced me already quite extensively, so let  
me just say by way of introduction that I work as a theorist  
(writing, lecturing) and as an organiser on culture, media, and  
technology. My time divides right now 50/50 between independent  
theory work and a position as co-ordinator of the media wing of De  
Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam.

You can find some further bio-information, links, texts and other  
materials on the Balie website here:
http://www.debalie.nl/persoon.jsp?personid=920

And a nice project of 2004 was the archaeology of imaginary media,  
which is partly documented in a web dossier on media archaeology, and  
hopefully will finally be complemented in the Fall with a book and dvd:
http://www.debalie.nl/archaeology

-----

I'm sorry that I'm late with my take on the discussion, and even more  
so that I'll probably only be able to really participate by the end  
of the week, but for now I want to send you an excerpt from a  
preparatory exchange with Christina on the theme of the lingering  
legacy of modernism / modernity. My take has become that it is  
improper to speak of a post-modern condition, if only because if  
culture and society were really past modernity it would simply be  
called differently. Beyond that, there's just to much modernity  
around us to say that it's over. Instead a term like hyper-modernity  
would better capture the spirit of the times, I think. Habermas  
called it 'late modernity', but my feeling is that we're really past  
that stage. Mostly this would be demonstrated by the lack of believe  
of any sensible person nowadays in universalist discourses, but also  
in more mundane terms, as for instance in the grandiose failure of  
the 'multi-cultural' society and its emancipatory claims (the "multi- 
cultural drama" as Dutch political theorist Paul Schaeffer calls it).  
Instead what becomes clear in various confrontations in deeply multi- 
ethnic cities like Amsterdam (even if we leave the extreme out, like  
the murder of flimmaker v. Gogh and so on) is a fundamental  
heterogeneity in society. Not so much a clash of cultures  
(reactionary poisonous talk), but an inability to translate  
judgements from one system to another, moral judgements foremost.  
Also, it seems rather impossible to reduce cultural differences and  
conflicts entirely to their material base, yet the same conflicts can  
also not be explained without their material underpinnings as part of  
the explanation.

So, roughly speaking then, the modern / modernity / modernism  
persists in many forms and modes, yet there is a growing  
consciousness of its limitations, short-comings fallacies, and  
fundamental incongruencies, which ultimately cannot be resolved  
without diossolving the core of what modernity is/was about. One of  
the ideas I'm toying around with regularly and recurringly is the  
question what it might mean to be hyper-modern? and secondly if it is  
possible to speculate what could lie beyond the modern, if it woud be  
possible to recognise this 'beyond' at all? On the latter I'm deeply  
sceptical. I don't think that's ever possible, but maybe it would be  
possible to highlight or intensify a sensibility for the things that  
are changing. This is also very much an experiental thing. For me  
these questions are therefore not just about theory or science, but  
also about experience and embodied action - 'art' could be a possible  
form in which to explore these other non- or not strictly discursive  
modes of exeperience that are connected to the sensation of being  
hyper-modern...

Anyway, here is the quote mentioned above, and I'll have to leave it  
at that here - will pick up on the discussion asap.

"I would prefer to focus in such a discussion on a notion that i  
would  call hyper-modernity and that picks up from the modernity /  
post- modernity debate between habermas and Lyotard in the later 80s  
and  that was carried through the 90s as well. I would agree that  
there is  a certain lingering legacy of modernity, which is a.o.,  
exemplified  in the many ways in which modernist motives inform the  
thought of the  later Lyotard, especially his aesthetics (of the  
sublime) and the  connection he makes to the incommensurability of  
language games,  especially vis-à-vis scientific and political  
discourse (that is  western discourses).

One of the questions that I have been asking myself for a long time   
and in different ways is how to get beyond this final stage of   
modernity, the hyper-modern as it were (but that's also just a  
term).  The problem being that the post-Lyotardian discourse locks  
itself in  a dead-end street, in many ways it is already up against  
the wall at  the end of that street.

Lyotard's rejection of technological mediation has been especially   
unproductive here, even if I share many of his reservations about   
universalist discourses in the modernist frame. So the question   
remains for me, how to stay away from and be critically aware of the   
fallacy of universalist modernist discourses, without falling into  a  
reactionary regression ((culturally and politically, think for   
instance of people like Roger Scruton behind the church organ in the   
English country side - no joke! he does it really!!), or conversely  
to become locked up in a hermetic discourse of the sublime and the   
incommensurable”

best wishes,
Eric